The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Conjunction of Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Venus and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 36' to the south of Jupiter.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 6° above the horizon at dawn.

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Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Jupiter at mag -2.1, both in the constellation Pisces.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Jupiter around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the two objects at the moment of conjunction will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Venus 01h32m30s 7°53'N Pisces -3.9 11"2
Jupiter 01h32m30s 8°29'N Pisces -2.1 33"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Sep 2024

The sky on 28 September 2024
Sunrise
06:36
Sunset
18:30
Twilight ends
20:04
Twilight begins
05:01

25-day old moon
Waning Crescent

10%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:26 12:29 18:31
Venus 09:17 14:28 19:39
Moon 02:14 09:46 17:05
Mars 23:35 07:11 14:47
Jupiter 22:01 05:33 13:05
Saturn 17:43 23:15 04:48
All times shown in EDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 planetary ephemeris published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

This event was automatically generated by searching the ephemeris for planetary alignments which are of interest to amateur astronomers, and the text above was generated based on an estimate of your location.

Related news

18 Nov 2010  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
30 Aug 2011  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
28 Oct 2011  –  Jupiter at opposition
25 Dec 2011  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

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Cambridge

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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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